Charity and the Strange Smell of Money / Sentivano uno strano, eccitante, pericoloso puzzo di dollari (Italo Alfaro, 1973)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2023 thread:

@Mickey13

That quacking acid synth line at the beginning makes you think this is going to to be a movie about a duck with a bad case of diarrhea peregrinating through the Wild West; this is however not the case, which is a shame, as that would have been infinitely more diverting than what is offered here. In a certain sense, this looks like a flick made by somebody trying their hand at directing in that the movie is framed in a sort of competent fashion, yet the overall decoupage, the general assembly of the narrative and the delivery of the gags all feel so thoroughly muffed that following the action is about as pleasing as seeing somebody abuse a child. The humor proves so awry and disconcertingly botched it is occasionally hard to tell whether the successive scenes are meant to provoke laughter, but fail to do so by reason of the mishandled rhythm and the badly structured, ill-conceived action, or if all of this is supposed to amuse in some post-ironic sense and the utterly fumbled and cumbrous rendition is not fumbled or cumbrous after all, but rather deliberately awkward in its final form.

The difference between comedy and non-comedy becomes blurred, engendering this bizarre melange of sequences whose intended effect comes to be basically inscrutable in the end. At the same time, there are some moments which are clearly included to prompt some chuckles, but their arrant one-dimensionality in combination with the deadpan delivery makes them essentially indigestible. None of that really matters at the end of the day though because viewing this is still quintessentially excruciating no matter how you spin it: the humor is so remarkably defective it is unbelievable it actually passes for a comedy and on top of all of the aforementioned faults, the storyline is just another derivative with no differentiating qualities whatsoever, all of which is terminally exacerbated by the fazingly impaired directing. Woah, goodness gracious, now that was really, really, reeeaaally fucking bad, indubitably one of the worst spaghetti westerns ever made.